STRIP TOWER (962)
January 27, 2026–March 1, 2029
The Luma Foundation announces the presentation of STRIP TOWER (962), 2023, a large-scale outdoor sculpture by Gerhard Richter (b. 1932, Dresden). Installed at Lake Silvaplana in Sils Maria, Engadin, the work will be on view as a long-term public installation for an initial period of three years. Presented as part of Elevation 1049, the sculpture extends the project’s geographical and conceptual reach into one of Switzerland’s most historically resonant and environmentally distinctive Alpine landscapes.
STRIP TOWER (962) translates Richter’s six-decade exploration of painting, photography, digital processes, and abstraction into three dimensions. The work evolves from his series of Strip Paintings, which he began in 2010, inspired by the earlier squeegee painting Abstract Painting 724-4 (1990). These paintings were photographed, scanned, digitally manipulated, and progressively divided into two, then four, eight, sixteen, and thirty-two vertical strips, which were subsequently stretched horizontally and realised on aluminium beneath Perspex.
In its sculptural form, eight vertical, interlocking panels clad in brightly striped ceramic tiles rise over five metres, creating a dense, layered composition. Their intersection generates a cross-shaped interior space that visitors can enter, immersing them in shifting fields of colour and light. Abstraction becomes spatial and experiential, engaging perception, materiality, and the surrounding Alpine landscape, a place Richter has returned to regularly since 1989, drawn to its crystalline light, dramatic topography, and contemplative atmosphere. STRIP TOWER (962) unfolds as a public experience over time, encouraging sustained attention and a heightened awareness of place.
Since 2014, Elevation 1049, conceived and produced by the Luma Foundation, has positioned the Swiss Alps as a site for ambitious contemporary art beyond institutional walls. Originally developed in Gstaad and the Saanenland and expanded in 2022 to St. Moritz, the project treats the Alpine landscape as an active intellectual and ecological field, commissioning site-responsive works that engage geography, climate, history, local communities, and global cultural questions. Through these initiatives, the Alps emerge as a living, thinking environment in which art shapes how we perceive, inhabit, and care for the world.
